Obammunism

As some of you already know, I’m a moderate Liberal. (Frankly, I’d have been a Republican, before Reagan saturated the party with evangelical nitwits.) I’ve been tepid about Obama for the last few years, and the PRISM shit, drone usage, peace talks with the Taliban, and his refusal to stop supporting the PATRIOT act have sent me into “He’s a fucking awful person and a bad president” territory. But I also have read things called “books,” learned “information” by reading “words,” and if there’s one thing I can’t stand about the Teabaggers, it’s their constant flinging of several words around.

“Communist.” Really? That’s supposed to be scary? Oh, hey, folks, the 1950s called, and they want their nationalist paranoia back. Even with current affairs, the Soviet/USA cold war is fucking over. We won. I know you don’t like to hear it. You want to sleep more soundly at night, thinking the Communists are forever lurking, like grout fungus, and only your adherence to Capitalism, like it’s some kind of RELIGION instead of an economic model, keeps us safe. You want to think that your right to eat fast food is somehow saving the country.

Psst! SPOILER ALERT! We still don’t have a real Free Market system. (Thank heavens, on that. I kind of like being able to buy food that doesn’t give me ebola or mad cow disease just because it’s inexpensive.)

Obama is no more a communist than I am a Rastafarian. What he IS, is a very bad president, who is supporting bad laws and bad legislation. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough that the two-party system just fucked us all over like a roofied high school senior at a prom gang bang? Couldn’t we come up with better arguments than “Obamunazi,” which doesn’t even make sense as a compound word insult? Where the fuck did that extra letter U come from? Should we also call the president a “boogerhead” and “a dork”?

They just use words like communist and socialist because somebody told them they couldn’t call him a n***** and they panicked and weren’t smart enough to actually think up words that really were applicable. They just floundered around and picked scary words from their childhoods.

Setting aside my disagreements with your statements about Obama, I’m more bugged you threw homophobia into that character’s mouth but only had the other one complaining about his abusing Obama’s name. C’mon.

A phobia is, by definition, an extreme and/or irrational fear. Disliking something is not the same as being afraid of it.

For example, I dislike discharging firearms with a non-hearing safe report while not wearing ear protection. It woudn’t be inaccurate to say that I’m afraid to discharge a firearm indoors under those conditions. However, because it’s not an irrational fear, it’s not a phobia.

I also really dislike doing hard physical labor when it’s hot, humid, and sunny out. However, I have no fear of working in those conditions, and I do it on a fairly regular basis during the summer.

Just because someone dislikes something, be it physical labor, being around extremely loud noises, or homosexuality, does not mean that individual has any type of fear associated with the aforementioned.

Everyone I know who “doesn’t like” homosexuals backs up their “distaste” with reasons that have everything to do with irrational fears.

– “Man, homos are gross.” Fear of being around someone dirty.
– “I’m okay with them as long as they don’t hit on me.” Fear of being approached by someone of the same gender.
– “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Fear that someone else’s homosexuality will somehow corrupt or tarnish their own sexuality.
– “They spread AIDS.” Fear that Homosexuality intrinsically pollutes the sex pool.
– “Faggots are so feminine.” Fear that being around someone who acts feminine will somehow rub off on them.

We know Tom’s a homophobe, and that Omar’s cool with it. That’s different from now knowing that, in the context of a strip where he’s calling out and complaining about offensive language, Mick is still cool with homophobic slurs being tossed around.

I’m assuming Mick is on the same boat I am. When I already know somebody’s a bigoted asshole, I don’t bat an eyelash when they act like an asshole by displaying bigotry. Among some of the population, “fag” is such a general-purpose insult and homophobia is so entrenched that you probably literally wouldn’t be able to get them to grasp the problem with using it. Trying to explain why a much newer and more specific term (like “Obammunist”) is stupid might have a prayer of getting through.

Look at it from a stereotypical (strawman?) bigot’s point of view. Homosexuality is wrong, by divine authority: it says so in your holy book. Really, really, abomination-level, go-directly-to-hell-do-not-pass-go wrong. What’s wrong with using a slur against evil incarnate? That’s assuming you even think of it as offensive in the first place; you may well just think “fag” is a perfectly acceptable term. Trying to get you to stop using it would first require that I demonstrate that it’s offensive, and then that it’s wrong to offend the group in question, which requires either my demonstrating that it’s wrong to intentionally offend pure evil, or that I demonstrate that your holy book is wrong. (The one where you’re told evil people will try to make you think it’s wrong.) If I were Mick, I’d rather just hurry the asshole out of the store.

I also don’t think Mick’s cool with anything in this strip. If Mick was then heading out for drinks with Tom, that’d be a different story. Working in retail and having to help somebody you hate doesn’t mean you’re cool with them at all. (On a related note, fuck working in retail.)

Not trying to piss on your parade here, but my POV on the peace talks with the terrorists is that it is a different approach. Terrorism isn’t something you can fight with a (physical) weapon. You need to take away the reason why those terrorists fight, so they have no more reason to fight. Instead of trying to subdue the terrorists, we need to build and educate (with RESPECT to the culture of where you do it).
We still haven’t learned from the wars we have fought.

And I may not be American, but I think Obama is a good president. Who is plagued/plagiarized by a bad goverment.

First of all, I think you need to read up on your definition of terrorist. A terrorist is someone who uses fear to spread ideology. That ideology is not going away just because you build them schools and respect their culture. Radical Muslims, notice radical, are committed to shoving their own twisted and violent interpretation of Islam down the collective throats of the rest of the world. Being nice to them will not change their minds.

And what about the Obama presidency are you in favor of? Higher taxes? Mandatory healthcare? Him not having the balls to stand up on actually important issues like marriage equality? Or just bloated and useless government in general?

I think mandatory healthcare is more important than marriage equality (doesn’t mean i don’t support that). And higher taxes is bad for the economy (which is even worse over here in Europe/Holland). And how can have the balls if every thing he tries is neutered by the Republican favored Capitol? That and as far as my (limited) knowledge goes, Democrat presidents don’t start wars and have to clean up the mess their predecessor(s) made.

As for terrorism, if you keep reacting with bombs, it will only escalate into even more violence. And radical Muslims aren’t always terrorist. And if you say Christians are so ‘good’, why don’t they follow the 10 commandments a bit closer? I’m an atheist, but I do respect people who believe, until they try to make me believe in their deity. But is there anything WRONG in trying to be nice for a change?

US involvement in WW1(Wilson), WW2(Roosevelt), Korea(Truman) and Vietnam(Kennedy) all began under Democratic administrations. Eisenhower and Nixon,both Republicans, negotiated ends to Korea and Vietnam.

That’s a bit of a shame, really. There’s a lot to learn from all of the presidential administrations. Those that spout that either O or W are/were the worst ever would have some eye opening revelations, no matter whatever their own personal political slant.

As the phrase goes, crack a book. A personal favorite starting point would be Nathan Miller’s _Theodore Roosevelt_.

Legion, I didn’t mention Christians once in my post, and I certainly didn’t say they were good. But nice straw-man.

As for being nice for a change, in case you didn’t notice, we ran out of money a few years back, and it’s time to stop chucking more at people who are just going to piss it away faster than we are.

As far as Obama being neutered by the “Republican favored capitol.” (BTW, Democrats control the White House and the Senate. The Supreme Court is pretty evenly split, and Republicans control the house only by a slim majority.) Most of the things that congress has blocked the president from doing are things the people don’t really want. Since you see to live in Holland, you probably don’t see that, just the media coming out of America. Or maybe you spend a lot of time here and disagree with me. But things like gun control and amnesty for illegal aliens (the high profile points where congress has blocked the president) are largely unpopular among voters. Other than that, most of the Obama agendas that have been blocked have been done so through budgets, and his proposals have been atrocious.

The way we’re going to get the terrorist to stop bombing people is the same way Christianity got neutered: give them something to lose. Just look at the USA. We’re the descendants of a people so religiously strict that they outlawed Christmas. Yeah. Look it up. But as time went by and (some) people stopped having to constantly struggle to keep themselves from starving, those people started to look at religion in a more lax fashion. Jump forward hundreds of years and you’ve got the modern world where most people don’t take the word of God too seriously. What we really need to do is cut back on our defense budget (we still need a well trained, well equipped military, don’t get me wrong) and put some of that money towards building up the infrastructure of these countries. In a few generations you’ll have what we have: people too concerned with their bank accounts, 401ks and car leases to be worried about if they should be sacrificing their lives for god.

Isn’t that exactly what’s been happening in Afghanistan for over a decade? And where is the progress? Best to give them something that [i]they have actually earned*[/i] to lose. So pull up stakes, embargo them, and let them have at it. It’s their country(s) after all. They can feel like they’ve won their freedom to be strict, dictating arseholes, and the rest of us won’t be throwing good money after bad.

*(give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish, yadda yadda)

But, oh yeah, oil. That’s all it comes back to. Without oil the middle east would be ethiopia: no-one would give a shit.

Unfortunately, you’re never going to convince the radical Muslim that we’re not the bad guys – they’re going to believe what they want because, as Snakedriver said, it’s really not about us, it’s about their ideals and goals. They believe that “defending the faith” is making sure there is no other in existence. Read up on the history if Islam, and the nature of the people where it came from. Before Islam, some of these people made a living off of raiding each other’s trade caravans. They were already violent people. There were Muslim martyrs just as there were Christian ones. Then, once Islam was established, they fought each other over the way the faith should go forward after Muhammad’s death because he left no plans behind. And when they split, the definition of jihad and what constitutes a “holy war” was different for various groups. As far as “being nice,” there’s nothing wrong with being nice, as it does portray us as a nation in a more favorable light, however, it will only take us so far. Don’t expect to win this by “being nice.” We are based on tolerance of all faiths. The radical is not tolerant – and never will be.

The problem with “being nice” is in those instances where it is perceived as being a display of weakness. Certain Islamic subcultures respect strength and dominance, while despising weakness; Being perceived as weak makes you a target.

Having been through a portion of the Army training on the matter, read some military history on the matter, and having deployed to Afghanistan and worked with the Afghanistan National Army, I may have some insight to offer here.

1. The populace is tired of the Afghan Taliban and hate the Pakistani Taliban. This same populace wants their sons and fathers to come home, stop fighting and start rebuilding their lives. To help further differentiate the two, the Afghan Taliban are more careful to hit military targets and minimize the civilian casualties, which makes them closer to an insurgency fighting an enemy who has greater strength. The Pakistani Taliban tend to threaten the civilians, plant IEDs and VBIEDs that kill as many civilians as coalition, more along the lines of terrorist.
2. This culture can simultaneously provide a measure of punishment they see fit to the Taliban, while re-integrating them into their society. (If this gets them to stop planting IEDs that kill troops and Civilians, I’m all for it.)
3. This will actually be the second peace talks to be attempted with the US, Taliban and Afghan Government. The first attempt ended in disaster and another 10 years of fighting that could have been avoided so we could focus on nation building, instead the Secretary of Defense at the time refused to allow the Taliban fighters to return peaceably to their homes, demanding they stand trial in American Courts and receive “justice.”
4. Radical Muslims are a minority, just like the radical Christians who decided to bomb abortion clinics in the late 90s and early 2000s were in the minority. Further, a fair number of those committing the attacks or transporting and planting the IEDs are doing so under coercion. Guys show up in their village and tell them to help the Taliban or they’ll kill your family, and family is everything.

As far as I’m concerned, the federal government (or the government in general) has absolutely no business having anything whatsoever to do with marriage. It’s not one of their duly delegated responsibilities.

From what I can tell, the only reason the government got involved in the marriage process in the first place was as a way to prevent “interracial” marriages, and it largely came into vogue during the reconstruction era. As such, the government has a history of using such laws to violate the sovereignty of the citizenry, and therefore it is exactly the sort of thing we shouldn’t trust the government to do.

Maybe not a communist, but definitely a socialist and Marxist. If you believe the man is not a Marxist, please name for me one policy or law he has pushed for that Karl Marx would disapprove of. Socialized medicine, gun control, ever increasing government power, “social justice”, “spreading the wealth”, it’s all classic socialism.

I do have to agree that the name calling is childish. But I wonder how many people griping about it now were gleefully joining in during the Bush years.

There’s substantial research showing that children tend strongly to adopt the same political beliefs as their parents.

Obama’s father was a Marxist. Obama himself says in his book that “I chose my friends carefully: The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.At night,in the dorms,we discussed neocolonialism,Franz Fanon,Eurocentrism,and patriarchy.When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake,we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints.”

I never really though Shrub was a good pejorative for him. It really didn’t make sense, as an insult. A synonym for bush? Really?

W is as close to “insulting” I got, according to some people, which also didn’t make sense to me. I started calling him W after seeing these stickers all over the place in meatspace (a reality that gave me a small chill every time I saw that emblazoned on the car – it smacked of fascist propaganda).

The difference being that I don’t know ANYONE – Democrat or otherwise – who bought that sticker outside of an election year. Buy stickers to support your candidate, hey, sure, fine. But the “W – THE PRESIDENT” stickers specifically began showing up 2-3 years after W was elected. I suppose you could say I find the insinuations of the sticker and accompanying text… I dunno. Something terribly uneasy on that. I did nearly get in a fistfight with one maroon at a stoplight, when I asked him if the sticker on the back of his truck was so that he could remember who was president. His response was “No, it’s to remind fuckers like YOU! And don’t you forget it!”

That kind of sentiment smacks of something horrible. And yes, I can say without a doubt that if I start seeing “O – THE PRESIDENT” stickers, I will feel precisely as uneasy.

I always thought that those stickers were done to rub the nose of people who kept referring to his election as a ”stolen” election, because of the Florida recounts. As I had an Aunt who was one of those people, it gets annoying after a couple of meetings.

The 2000 election, if nothing else, proved to me that the recount was pointless – also proved to me that the voting system was horrifically broken. Whether you believe Gore or Bush got more votes, it all came down to the Supreme Court, which I still say is a travesty unlike I’ve seen in politics any other time in my life. What a crock of shit.

I accepted the judgment, because hell, what choice did I have? I’m just a guy, you know?

But those stickers… they stuck in my craw. They smacked of worshipping a fuhrer. And it wasn’t just the stickers.

That billboard went up in 2006. Not during an election year. And it gave me a serious case of the willies, probably because I’ve studied WWII Germany. (If you try to invoke Godwin’s law, I will call you an idiot.) You don’t see any billboards like that about Obama, and you didn’t see those kinds of billboards with Clinton, either. That there is some Nazi-assed propaganda, I tell you what.

You need to brush up on your Marxism. “Ever increasing government power,” which you asserted, is the exact opposite of a classless society. You’d be better off calling it fascism, except that fascism wasn’t a Baby Boomer or Gen X scare word like communism and socialism are.

It won’t be much of a change. To paraphrase Malcom Tucker:”The ruling elite has abandoned morality for popularity.” Every decision a politician makes is based on
a) How will it please my sponsors
b) How will it keep my popularity amongst the lowest common denominator of my voters
The greater good of the nation be damned and it’s the same in all democratic countries, not just USA.

So, there I was, in third grade. That was the year where I went to four schools — PRCongo (was there for the revolution the year before), Maine, Minnesota, and not-quite-yet-Zaire. Being a spook brat (which is weirder than military brat), and my best friend in Brazzaville having been an MI6 brat (and yes, our parents became friends), I actually knew at the tender age of 8 what nukes WERE, and had a vague idea of how they worked – at least the Fat Man / Little Boy designs.

So, there I was in school in Minneapolis, for a month or so between Christmas break and flying off to Leopoldville. The sirens went off for a duck-and-cover drill. Everybody except me dived under their desks. I asked what was going on, and the teacher said to duck and cover because it was practice in case the Russians bombed us. I pointed out that this close to a big city, we’d all get vaporized. She wasn’t amused. She was less amused when I talked about having listened to mortars going off, the year before.

I had a teacher in 11th grade who told us that the “duck and cover” was not so you’d be spared, as that was impossible (we lived near an Army base). It was so when people came in after, they’d be able to name each pile of dust. (Assuming that the seating chart still survived in a vault somewhere…..)

You claim to have read books, but if you actually had read more than just what confirmed your worldview/side of the issue then you would realize the uneducated call Obama a communist (or muslim) because that is the closest fit to their experience base that they know. Since Socialism, Marxism, Communism, Fascism, and even Nazism (National State Socialist Part) are all part of the same coin of collective statist control ideology does it really matter which name a skunk goes by??

However if you really want to get to the nitty gritty, the closest to what Obama Is comes from a book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” by Dinesh Souza. In it he says that Obama is a Anti-Colonialist of the brand fostered in the 1950’s and 60’s in Africa, much like his father was. The Anti-colonialist movement during that time was often supported by Communist regimes of the day, the USSR, Cuba, and China, and many of the leaders of the movement were either actual socialists or or held to those ideals to gain the wealth and power they sought. Between the grand parents on his mother’s side who raised him (members of the Communist Party of the United States) his socialist/marxist buddies in school (from his own words in his books) and his fathers socialist leanings (whose “goals and dreams” he aspired to according to his book dreams of my father) it isn’t surprising that he often reflects or even embraces the socialist methods in achieving his goals, while pursuing his anti-colonial policies. In case you didn’t know Many third world nations view the USA as a colonial power now since we decided to take up the global “police force” status after WWII.

And that is where most people get the idea he is a “communist”

By the way you forgot to add Supporting Al-Qaeda terrorist cells in Syria, also known as “Syrian” rebels/freedom fighters, in the bid to arm the insurgency against the ruling regime in Syria.

Yep, that’s the problem people have with understand what socialism/communism are. It’s one of those really great ideas that works on paper but when given into the hands of real humans never makes it off the ground. That’s my biggest gripe about some of the republican ideologies. If the world was filled with intelligent, caring, forward thinking people, we wouldn’t need bureaucracy or taxes or minimum wage laws. People would take care of their communities and companies would take care of their workers.

But as real life shows, the world is full of greedy, short sighted asshats who will fuck over their next door neighbor if it means they can have a bigger steak for dinner.

Fascism and communism are diametric opposites in pretty much every single way. Anyone who lumps the two together (or, ye gods, tries to claim that the Nazis actually were socialists just because the word was in the name) needs to crack a fucking book.

ok, you’re talking about throwing words around and you’re calling us “teabaggers” a gay sex act.

also remember most of us “tea party” types are just as pissed off with both parties. one insults us and thinks we’re stupid, just for asking them to uphold the contract they swore to (that would be the constitution) the other begs for our support, THEN insults us and calls us stupid AFTER they get into power, and wipes their ass with the same contract. at least the democrats are honest about it.

is it so wrong, to have a contract that says “you can’t do the following things, and you can do these other things, and that’s it…everything else is someone else’s job” (again, the constitution) and expect our employees to abide by the contract?

I didn’t invent the Teabagger moniker. Y’all did. Don’t argue with me on this – I remember very well when the Dallas Tea Party started calling themselves Teabaggers, then tried to roll it back when they realized they’d basically tried to own an incredibly foul name for themselves. You will always be Teabaggers to me. You like having a man’s balls in your mouth. You tried to make this your banner, before you realized you done fucked up. Don’t like it? Find a new banner. You already stuck these balls in your mouth, good luck on taking the name back.

My real problem with the “Tea Party” is that the morons involved don’t even know just how selfish and idiotic the event they took their name from was. It wasn’t a protest of taxes. The colonists had a black market tea trade going on and were collecting a pretty penny. Then the mainland British started to import low-cost tea.

Then, after they tossed the crates overboard, there must have been a fair degree of colonial face-palming, since they carried out their raid during low tide and had to hop down into the water to smash up the crates of legally imported tea.

“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”

-Robert Heinlein

But, if we must have one, the correct term for Obama would be Statist. Along with practically every politician in existence.

And with this one simple sentence, “But I also have read things called “books,” learned “information” by reading “words,” and if there’s one thing I can’t stand about the Teabaggers, it’s their constant flinging of several words around”, you just destroy any possibly credibility you might have in this argument. If you’re going to get pissy about using slang names for people or groups, then you need to look in the mirror and realize that you’re perpetuating the very behavior that you so despise in others.

I personally love using the term “teabagger” because it shows exactly what was wrong with the idiots who flooded, and effectively corrupted, the original Tea Party, which I had no problems with. The original Tea Party was, from the members I met, a cooler-headed group of Libertarians, Democrats, and Republicans who were pushing for hard tax reform. Then Obama hit the 2007 campaigns, and lordy lordy lordy. Suddenly it was in vogue to call yourself a “teabagger,” wear bags of tea on your heads (something the original TP would never have done), and scream about the President being a Muslim Marxist Socialist Kenyan Nigger Jew Lizard Satan. This was not the Tea Party that I was familiar with.

And you losers were so out of touch, you weren’t aware the slang meaning of Teabagging.

I lose credibility for calling you fuckers the very name that you originally embraced?

Hey, how about you stuff some balls in your mouth and just accept that the New Tea Party is just a slavering bunch of morons? Tell ya what: if you were a member of the Tea Party before 2006, I’ll apologize. But I would like to see proof. And then I’d like to know why you still identify with this horde of rabid clowns.

If we apply this to gun owners, we are all inbred rednecks with a meth addiction because there are plenty of examples of gun owners who fit that stereotype.

It, however, completely ignores that there are so many other types of people who own guns. Single moms, married couples, different ethnic groups, religions (Sikhs in California are suing to overturn CA AWB), etc, etc.

No group is completely homogeneous. There will be crazies, fuckwads, and totally irresponsible individuals in ANY group. Targeting those individuals as representative of an entire group is disingenuous and intellectually dishonest.

Unless you are talking about the Flat Earth Society.

Also, your obsession with people putting male testicles in their mouths is a little off putting, to say the least.

Ay, there’s the rub: I am not applying shit I saw on the news to a group of strangers.

Absurd example of a group? I attended one of their rallies in 2009 in Dallas. The whole fucking group is absurd. I have never seen so many overtly racist, angry, old white people all in one place before. Many of them held signs with slogans about how the people would rise up. I’m sure the Teabaggers could rise up. Then they’d sit back down on their Rascal scooters after 90 seconds, sweating and wheezing into their oxygen tubes.

And yes, I do remember VERY CLEARLY when, for a week in 2008, these groups decided to publicly call themselves Teabaggers.

I’m not letting that go. If you find my use of the word offensive, too bad. My obsession? Hey, I’m not the one calling myself a term that means putting balls in people’s mouths and/or having testicles in my mouth. I’m just acknowledging that groups right to call themselves that. I will fight for their right to call themselves that, until such time that they choose some other, even more outlandishly hilarious term – I’m thinking Monkeyfuckers would be a good one, no?

There are many, many Flickr accounts, many other photo-hosting sites, that have entire albums of pictures taken at teabagger rallies. Find me just one album. Just one. Find me a teabagger rally album, and it can be photos taken by a teabagger, that lacks a single shot of jackasses holding racist, heavily neo-con, or heavily Christian signs. Bonus points if someone in the crowd is less than lily-white, or more than 10 of them are younger than 40. Show me a photo album on the internet of a teabagger rally that lacks old racist fucks screaming about how Obama is a Nigger Jew Lizard Kenyan Socialist Nazi Goat Alien Marxist Satan.

See if you can do this. Take your time. Difficulty: Album must have more than 15 pictures in it. No posting 2 pics and saying “DURR I TOLE YA SO.”

I was referring to the one group calling themselves “teabaggers”, and by your assertion that by doing so they have the rights to rename the entire loosely organized group known as the “tea party” throughout the nation.

Back in ’09 Obama visited the Texas A&M campus for the Points of Light Institute’s Presidential Forum on Service. George Bush Sr. invited Obama to speak on volunteering. Since I was unemployed at the time, I decided to show up and just document the protestors (there were also supporters, but they were HEAVILY outnumbered) who showed up. And while there were some non-white protestors and a lot of the crowd was under 40 (college campus), everything else is spot-on.

By the way, there are social scientists who have noted that Communism resembles a religion in many ways that capitalism does not. A holy book, icons in the home and public buildings. And thousands of people queuing up to view the embalmed bodies of saints in glass cases for decades after their deaths.

I was ok with some of your rants, right up until you started defending your use of the term ‘teabagger’…
Name calling (and defense of same) is just poor form.
The way you handled the comments on your strip of 6/10 was the beginning of the end, but today’s antagonism just finalized my decision: removal of FTF from my RSS feed.
I can use the 40 or so seconds that I usually spend here doing something more pleasurable or productive…
Not that you’ll care- one reader among the millions and millions that read your site is no big deal.
Thanks for (almost) everything.
TBG

Not so much that Obama is a bad president, but you have GOP in the legislative who have set out to prevent Obama from accomplishing anything. Not to mention a right-wing noise machine that thinks anything Obama does is bad.

I’m sorry that you think that because I have to disagree: he is a bad president. That’s not a political thing and it’s not a race thing, he’s just bad at doing the job. He’s gone back on his word and he’s made a bad example of himself for future generations. Either that or he has been a puppet of a heretofore unknown power structure that is being consumed to further their own ends. In whatever scenario you paint him, the grief, stress, strife, and destruction that he has allowed to run unchecked is what paints him for the history books to report on from now on.

The best way for us to “get our Shit together” is to end private campaign financing and have publicly funded elections on ALL LEVELS of government. This would open the political system up to multi party status and the government up to partisan collaborative compromise function (hopefully).

Buzzkill time: Corporate interests are less likely to allow this without an ugly kicking screaming fight than we are to see the Cubs win Game 7 of the World Series in a blizzard at a version of Wrigley in Hell. It’s maddening how simple the solution is, and how to get there is so daunting.

Fuck, time to go drink the bitterest IPA I can find at 9:20 in the morning.

I’m actually fairly certain that would destroy the election process even more. I’m all for getting rid of corporate donations and big-wig contributors, and I’m especially against those that are out there knowingly buying legislation.

However, Tytler’s dilemma suggests that a democracy can only last until the voters realize that they can vote for whomever gives them the most back out of the treasury. In our original, Constitutional government, that would have been fine, because the people couldn’t have voted back out of the government more than what they had put into it, but FDR’s blatant violation of the Constitution expanded federal power to the degree that now, quite literally, people are voting on how much ‘federal assistance’ they’re going to get. Social security shouldn’t exist at the federal level, but once it did, people started voting for more and more social welfare.

Now that people can just ask the federal government to give them things, and have a reasonable expectation they’ll get it (like free health care, or scholarships, the latter of which has arbitrarily inflated the cost of college to ridiculous proportions, and the former of which will likely do more of the same), then the path of government is inevitable. People will vote for more and more, taxes will go up and up, and eventually we’ll be like every other nation in the world, and out of necessity, we’ll just *be* socialists.

I’ve often thought of our current president’s policies should be called “Obamaide” because it’s similar to the Jim Jones kool-aide except that you don’t get to die, it’s just the economy that feels that way. As for the man himself, I call him “booger-head”.

Full disclosure: I don’t know a thing about fascism, communism, or socialism. I’m as ignorant about the differences between them as most Americans seem to be.

HOWEVER, when those three terms are tossed around as synonyms for “evil,” without any discussion of the historical contexts of those words or how they apply to the issue at hand, even a dummy like me can tell that something’s wrong. When two presidents from two different parties support the exact same policies, except that one is called a tyrannical socialist while the other is called a freedom-loving American, something’s wrong.

Saying “pot, meet kettle” brings you joy? Really? The bar’s that low, eh? I bet if your gramma crumbles up a ball of paper and throws it across the floor, you’re just ecstatic for hours, aren’t you? If you’re really good, does she bust out the laser pointer?

Since I don’t know the President as a person, I can’t say whether he is a good person or not. He might be a great guy, or might be a total asshole. I can’t comment on that personally.

I definitely disagree with some of his policies and actions as a President. I won’t bother listing them, as that would take a bit of time, and I’d no doubt receive some flak for some of the ones that I actually do support. But I do agree with you on the name-calling above, especially when it makes absolutely no sense.

While I find the overencompassing use of the term “teabagger” irritating for those of us who felt we had been Taxed Enough Already back when, I understand the use of it to describe the New Tea Party.

As typically happens in politics:

A small group of people have a well defined position on a specific topic. Their position resonates with a larger population, and politicians (who can’t let a group of voters go unpandered to) hitch themselves to the bandwagon. Unsurprisingly, people who like those politicians jump on the bandwagon and start to dilute the original message. Eventually, the mainstream media and the political opposition (historically two different groups) use the political figures (people they know) to define the group at large (people they don’t know) and the issues at hand.

Suddenly, people who expected some crisis to come and were desperate to find an equitable solution to it are lumped in with batshit crazy people of all stripes, who also want to find a good solution to the problem (or who want to profit off the search for it).

The original TEA party people had little to no official stance on social issues, or immigration, or really anything else that wasn’t fiscal or constitutional, they were fairly libertarian and mostly solely concerned with taxation. Those limited concepts brought in the crowds and the crowds were full of likely voters. As politicians like bachmann and palin got on board, they brought their personal supporters and their republican agenda with them.

While I’m not embarassed by nutters mailing tea bags to congress wanting to reform the tax system, I am embarassed by the religious right (and other self-righteous groups) building their alters on the backs of a limited and (IMO) necessary discussion. Their presence has overwhelmed the original discussion, and caused great harm to the discussion of the issue.

Suggesting that the unfettered growth of government funded insurance and charity programs is a real burden that deserves a real conversation is little more than racist yammering of the rednecks does little to foster that conversation. At the same time, having racist rednecks on that side of the conversation does little to foster it as well.

my first comment to your fine series, and i’ll keep reading, since i know you aren’t talking about me when you say teabagger.

I edited one of my earlier posts, because I mistook Republic Of Texas people for TEA Party members. But their message was the same as the old-skool TEA members – I can get on board with the rhetoric that the pre-2008 TEA members espoused. Good people. As you identified, when I say teabagger, I mean people who took up the mantle after 2007. They’re frankly a very ridiculous lot, and more than a little frightening in their diatribes. I do believe that tax reform is necessary. The current tax system in America is horseshit. But when I go to a rally and I see a guy waving a big sign that says “OBAMA GO BACK TO KENYA” with an image of Obama decked out as Hitler… how the fuck am I supposed to take that seriously?

As president, Obama deserves a certain level of respect. As far as his actions/policies/appointments he is by far the worst president that I can remember. We have a AG that openly ignores both Federal Law and the Constitution. We have NY Mayor that is out claiming the Boston Bomber and the CA mass killer as “Gun Victums”. We have IL that is still attempting to block CCW. We have an IRS that has SWAT teams and is bias against non-Democrats. The country is broken in a lot of ways.
We need to vote out these people, if that does not happen soon enough there will be other extreme problems to deal with.